Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

PhoneGap VS Scrapy

Compare PhoneGap VS Scrapy and see what are their differences

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PhoneGap logo PhoneGap

Easily create apps using the web technologies you know and love: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework
  • PhoneGap Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-14
  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11

PhoneGap features and specs

  • Cross-Platform Development
    PhoneGap allows developers to create applications for multiple platforms, such as iOS and Android, using a single codebase. This reduces development time and effort.
  • Leverages Web Technologies
    PhoneGap uses standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making it accessible for web developers to transition into mobile app development without learning new languages.
  • Access to Native APIs
    PhoneGap provides access to native device features such as the camera, accelerometer, and file system through a unified JavaScript API, enabling rich, native-like user experiences.
  • Large Plugin Library
    PhoneGap has a wide range of plugins available, giving developers the flexibility to add various functionalities to their apps without having to write complex native code.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source framework, PhoneGap is free to use and has a large community of developers contributing to its improvement and providing support.

Possible disadvantages of PhoneGap

  • Performance Issues
    Since PhoneGap apps rely on WebView components to render the user interface, they may not perform as well as fully-native apps, especially for graphics-intensive applications.
  • Limited Advanced Native Features
    While PhoneGap provides access to basic native functionalities, it may not support all the advanced features and optimizations available in native development.
  • Dependency on Plugins
    PhoneGap's reliance on plugins for additional functionalities can lead to compatibility issues, especially if the plugins are not actively maintained or updated.
  • UI Consistency
    Achieving a consistent look and feel across different platforms can be challenging, as PhoneGap utilizes web technologies that may render differently on iOS and Android.
  • Learning Curve for Performance Optimization
    While web developers might find it easy to start with PhoneGap, optimizing the app for performance, particularly on mobile devices, can require a significant amount of additional learning and tweaking.

Scrapy features and specs

  • Efficiency
    Scrapy is designed to be efficient and robust, capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously and scraping large websites in a fast and reliable manner.
  • Built-in Tooling
    Scrapy comes with built-in tools for handling common tasks such as following links, extracting data using XPath and CSS, and exporting data in a variety of formats.
  • Customization
    Scrapy offers extensive customization options, allowing users to build complex spiders and modify their behavior through middleware and pipelines.
  • Python Integration
    Being a Python framework, Scrapy integrates seamlessly with the Python ecosystem, enabling the use of libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and others to process and analyze scraped data.
  • Community Support
    Scrapy has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, tutorials, and third-party extensions to enhance functionality.
  • Asynchronous Processing
    Scrapy’s asynchronous processing model enhances performance by allowing multiple concurrent requests, reducing the time required for crawling sites.

Possible disadvantages of Scrapy

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For beginners, Scrapy's comprehensive feature set and the need for understanding concepts like XPath and CSS selectors can be challenging.
  • Resource Intensive
    Scrapy can be resource-intensive, potentially consuming significant memory and CPU, which can be problematic for scraping very large websites or running multiple spiders simultaneously.
  • Debugging Complexity
    Debugging Scrapy projects can be complex due to its asynchronous nature and the multiple layers of middleware and pipelines that need to be understood.
  • Overhead for Small Projects
    For simple or small-scale scraping tasks, the overhead of setting up and configuring a Scrapy project might be excessive, with simpler alternatives being more suitable.
  • Limited JavaScript Support
    Scrapy's out-of-the-box support for JavaScript-heavy websites is limited, requiring additional tools like Splash or Selenium, which can complicate the setup.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Scrapy's dependencies and compatibility with other Python packages can sometimes be challenging, leading to potential conflicts and maintenance overhead.

Analysis of PhoneGap

Overall verdict

  • As of the latest developments, PhoneGap has been deprecated and is no longer being actively maintained. Adobe, the company behind PhoneGap, has encouraged developers to switch to Apache Cordova, which is the open-source foundation of PhoneGap. Therefore, it is not recommended for new projects.

Why this product is good

  • PhoneGap was once popular for allowing developers to create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making it easy for web developers to transition into mobile app development. It provided cross-platform compatibility and leveraged web technologies to build applications for Android, iOS, and other platforms without needing to learn platform-specific languages.

Recommended for

    Developers who are currently using PhoneGap should consider migrating to Apache Cordova or exploring other modern alternatives for cross-platform development such as React Native, Flutter, or Xamarin.

Analysis of Scrapy

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Scrapy is a good option for those looking to implement web scraping projects due to its robust set of features, active community, and comprehensive documentation. It is particularly well-suited for projects that require scraping from multiple websites and processing large volumes of data efficiently.

Why this product is good

  • Scrapy is a popular open-source web crawling framework for Python that's designed for extensive, flexible, and efficient web scraping. Its built-in tools and features make it easy to extract data from websites quickly and automatically. Key advantages include its ability to handle requests asynchronously, its support for multiple protocols, its item pipeline feature that allows for data cleaning and storage, and its ease of integration with other Python libraries and databases.

Recommended for

    Scrapy is recommended for developers, data scientists, and businesses that need to gather data from websites efficiently. It's particularly useful for projects involving data aggregation, market research, competitive analysis, and monitoring pricing changes across various platforms.

PhoneGap videos

What is PhoneGap and Cordova?

More videos:

  • Review - Is phonegap any good ?
  • Review - Introduction to PhoneGap - An Open Source Framework

Scrapy videos

Python Scrapy Tutorial - 22 - Web Scraping Amazon

More videos:

  • Demo - Scrapy - Overview and Demo (web crawling and scraping)
  • Review - GFuel LemoNADE Taste Test & Review! | Scrapy

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to PhoneGap and Scrapy)
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping
0 0%
100% 100
JavaScript Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Data Extraction
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare PhoneGap and Scrapy

PhoneGap Reviews

Top 10 Flutter Alternatives for Cross-Platform App Development
Developed by Apache Cordova, PhoneGap is used extensively for developing cross-platform mobile with the use of several web technologies. It lets developers write code by using HTML, CSS & JavaScript and package it as a native app. Being a simple framework, it includes the largest collection of plugins that extend its wide functionality.
Exploring 15 Powerful Flutter Alternatives
Adobe PhoneGap is a distribution of the open-source Apache Cordova project for building cross-platform mobile apps. PhoneGap makes integrating Adobe services for analytics, marketing automation, and monetization easy. For apps focused on advertising revenue or lead generation, PhoneGap can accelerate leveraging Adobe’s audience segmentation, funnel tracking, and attribution...
Best Mobile App Development Tools for Kids
A technology used for cross-platform mobile app development is referred to as PhoneGap. All the problems which we have seen above can be solved by PhoneGap easily. PhoneGap is an open-source mobile application framework. It allows developers to develop applications using standard web APIs. PhoneGap was developed by Nitobe Software, which is known as Adobe.
Source: codinghero.ai
10 Best Android Studio Alternatives For App Development
PhoneGap is another kind of tool among alternatives. Using this tool, you can develop cross-platform applications. The PhoneGap is an open-source development tool. And this is used for building iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other mobile apps with JavaScript. If you are using PhoneGap then you can reduce the development cost, time and effort.
Source: techdator.net
Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development
As one of the popular mobile app development framework, Adobe and Apache have Adobe PhoneGap. Its open-source and flexible nature has been the crux of its rising popularity. It utilizes the built-in JavaScript API to establish a connection with the native features of mobile devices and the OS. It has a large and robust backend for easy development of native mobile applications.
Source: medium.com

Scrapy Reviews

Top 15 Best TinyTask Alternatives in 2022
The software is simply deployable via the cloud, or you can host the spiders on your server using Scrapy. Only the rules need to be written; Scrapy will take care of the rest to separate the facts. With Scrapy’s portability and ability to run on Windows, Linux, Mac, and BSD platforms, new features can be added without affecting the program’s core.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Scrapy seems to be a lot more popular than PhoneGap. While we know about 97 links to Scrapy, we've tracked only 1 mention of PhoneGap. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

PhoneGap mentions (1)

Scrapy mentions (97)

  • Current problems and mistakes of web scraping in Python and tricks to solve them!
    One might ask, what about Scrapy? I'll be honest: I don't really keep up with their updates. But I haven't heard about Zyte doing anything to bypass TLS fingerprinting. So out of the box Scrapy will also be blocked, but nothing is stopping you from using curl_cffi in your Scrapy Spider. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Automate Spider Creation in Scrapy with Jinja2 and JSON
    Install scrapy (Offical website) either using pip or conda (Follow for detailed instructions):. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Analyzing Svenskalag Data using DBT and DuckDB
    Using Scrapy I fetched the data needed (activities and attendance). Scrapy handled authentication using a form request in a very simple way:. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Scrapy Vs. Crawlee
    Scrapy is an open-source Python-based web scraping framework that extracts data from websites. With Scrapy, you create spiders, which are autonomous scripts to download and process web content. The limitation of Scrapy is that it does not work very well with JavaScript rendered websites, as it was designed for static HTML pages. We will do a comparison later in the article about this. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • What is SERP? Meaning, Use Cases and Approaches
    While there is no specific library for SERP, there are some web scraping libraries that can do the Google Search Page Ranking. One of them which is quite famous is Scrapy - It is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It offers rich developer community support and has been used by more than 50+ projects. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing PhoneGap and Scrapy, you can also consider the following products

Apache Cordova - Platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Apify - Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.

Ionic - Ionic is a cross-platform mobile development stack for building performant apps on all platforms with open web technologies.

ParseHub - ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. With our advanced web scraper, extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need.

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Octoparse - Octoparse provides easy web scraping for anyone. Our advanced web crawler, allows users to turn web pages into structured spreadsheets within clicks.